Tunisian Man Accused Last Year of Terrorism Pleads Guilty to Lesser Counts

A Tunisian man who federal prosecutors said last year had wanted to commit acts of terrorism pleaded guilty on Tuesday to two charges that did not specifically mention terrorism.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan said last year that the defendant, Ahmed Abassi, 27, had been secretly recorded discussing his desire “to engage in terrorist acts against targets in the United States and other countries,” and had proposed a plot to poison the air or the water with bacteria to kill up to 100,000 people.

Mr. Abassi was charged in an indictment unsealed in May 2013 with two counts of fraud and misuse of visas to facilitate an act of international terrorism, counts that carried maximum prison terms of 25 years each.

But in April, a prosecutor said in court that the government was proposing that Mr. Abassi plead guilty to two less serious counts and face up to six years in prison; he would also have to agree to deportation after completing his sentence.

If he accepted the offer, Mr. Abassi would not be asked to admit that either offense “touched on a crime of international terrorism,” the prosecutor, Michael Ferrara, said.

On Tuesday, Mr. Abassi pleaded guilty to the lesser charges. One count charged him with making a false statement upon his arrival at Kennedy International Airport in March 2013, telling officials that he had traveled to the United States to work in real estate. The second count accused him of making false representations on an application to obtain a green card, with the intent of defrauding the United States.

It was unclear why the government shifted its position and allowed Mr. Abassi to plead to charges with no mention of terrorism. The United States attorney’s office in Manhattan declined to comment.

In entering his plea, Mr. Abassi told Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum in Federal District Court that he had “in fact lied” in the application.

Speaking through an interpreter, he said that he had actually come to the United States at the urging of a man whom he did not know was an undercover agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with the hope of obtaining travel documents that would enable him to travel to Canada.

Prosecutors said last year that Mr. Abassi had come to the attention of law enforcement during an F.B.I. investigation that revealed that he had “radicalized” a man later arrested in Canada in an alleged plot linked to Al Qaeda to derail a passenger train.

After arriving in the United States, Mr. Abassi was kept under surveillance by law enforcement, and was secretly recorded discussing terrorist plots with the undercover agent, prosecutors have said in court papers.

In those discussions, Mr. Abassi also expressed “his intention to provide support and funding to organizations engaged in terrorist activity,” including Al Qaeda in Iraq, and proposed his bioterrorism plot, prosecutors said.

Mr. Abassi’s lawyer, Sabrina Shroff, said in court recently that her client had been “entrapped” by the government; she said that the authorities sought to “build up a case that they thought would be the case of the century, which never came to bear because Mr. Abassi refused to engage in any concrete plan of terrorism.”

Ms. Shroff said in court Tuesday that she would ask for a sentence of “time served” for Mr. Abassi, who has been detained for about 14 months; he is to be sentenced on July 23.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Tunisian Man Accused Last Year of Terrorism Pleads Guilty to Lesser Counts. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe